The seventh in the series by Paul Wallis, Chaplain General of Jesus Generation, and lecturer in Church History and Hermeneutics at Unity College, A.C.T.
As a young Christian worker I found myself actively involved in the Student Community up and down the country. It was an interesting time. Old denominational delineations were rapidly losing their hold on a new generation of Christians, and debates between liberal, evangelical and charismatic Christians were intense and heated. The Universities and Colleges were stimulating environments in which to find one’s feet in the faith.
As I toured and visited various student communities, a name kept repeating itself: the name of a community. Each new academic year students would return from their summer vacations. As they did I kept encountering Christians whose faith and walk with God had been ignited, their vigour and appetite turbo-charged as the result of a few days or weeks spent in the Alps in this same little community. People today are beginning to talk about the initiating role of expressions of close community. This is exactly what I was seeing. This was the ministry of this remote mountain-top community half a world away.
This particular story of community as initiation went back a full forty years.
It was 1948 when Francis and Edith Schaeffer landed in Europe. They had spent the previous ten years in congregation-based ministry in the Bible Presbyterian Church in the USA. Now they moved to Europe following a missionary call to a part of the world where they perceived the mainstream churches to be slip-sliding into a Gospel-less liberalism. Francis had come to strengthen the evangelical faith.
They expected to do this through a ministry to the pulpits and lecture halls of the local reformed churches, and on the side to have a ministry through hospitality.
Unfortunately their departure from the States had been amid some untidy politics. (Theirs was a denomination sometimes known for politics, fragmented as it was into the “Bible Presbyterians” the “Orthodox Presbyterians” and the “Reformed Presbyterians”.) The upshot of this rancour was that the Schaeffer’s landed in Switzerland to learn that their main source of sponsorship would no longer be forthcoming and that all the reformed churches of their district had received letters dis-endorsing the Schaeffer’s ministry. In a part of the church where alignment and presbyteral recommendation is everything, that effectively closed every pulpit to them. Their hopes for transforming the churches via the clergy had met with an emphatic full stop.
What of their call? They were certainly not to renegue on that. Tutoring brought them a modest income and enabled them at least to survive – albeit without many luxuries!
Francis and Edith decided together that they would discharge their teaching ministry to any who would get to know them and to any who were willing to cross their threshold and enjoy the hospitality of their home.
At first their Sunday church consisted of Francis, Edith and the two girls “gathered” in the girl’s bedroom – which was the larger of the two rooms they rented in their pensione.
Then gradually as they befriended people in the town, and as their girls befriended their young neighbours, a trickle of friends began coming to their home for church and for “conversation parties” which were always question-based.
Congregational or big-church often fragments families – dividing the kids into kids church, the youth into youth group, adults into Bible-study groups and on top of that there may be women’s fellowships for the women and a men’s program for the men. Purely by force of circumstance, the Schaeffer’s had now put their family and their home and the natural network of social relationships surrounding their household at the very centre of their ministry. That is a turnaround which many involved in today’s missional communities, emerging churches, and household churches can relate to wholeheartedly. Having the family or household at the heart of the church sets a far fuller DNA in the heart of the church community.
Their ministry was invitational in the same way that any church has an invitational approach. The difference was that their inviting was preceded by diligent befriending – through being good neighbours, through tutoring; through placing great value on every human interaction. In other words; through really living. Furthermore, what the Schaeffer’s invited people to was not a program, a service, or some artificial structure for “fellowship”. They were inviting people to their home. And people who came were able to “come and see” just what their faith looked like – incarnated in their home life. It was this giving of value to befriending and hospitality that began opening up a whole new chapter for the Schaeffers.
Francis had a scholastic approach to explaining the faith beginning by unpacking our worldview and philosophical starting points. This enabled him to discuss and reason with people with very different takes on life. Many of us get stuck when we present our beliefs and our friends say, “That’s lovely, but I believe this other thing.” Schaeffer respectfully and thoroughly engaged with people on that deeper level, presenting not just a message in a bubble but a whole understanding of the universe in which we choose what to believe – proceeding from the Bible itself.
This approach made him very stimulating and relevant company for intellectuals, students and people who had intellectual problems with orthodox Christianity – the kind of people who might find a liberal Christianity, accommodated to the beliefs and values of the world, attractive.
One visitor led to another, and bit by bit the Schaeffer’s were able to afford to rent a chalet, then buy one.
At that early stage when the family had been squashed into their two-room billet, they had made a decision in faith not to advertise their needs, but simply to do what they could and pray. They wanted the very existence of their ministry – which they called l’Abri (meaning the shelter) to be a testimony to the existence of a God who is there and who answers prayer.
After a time Francis books began to take off all around the world, bringing in new finances and enabling them to expand their pattern of life further to include ever more guests.
Their growth was not immediate and for a long time Francis was frustrated that he literally only had one or two people at a time who were at all interested in his contribution to the evangelical faith. His family became wise to when it was best to tactfully withdraw when Francis was in a mood. And more than once household items such as pot plants felt the full force of Francis’ frustration. His focus on the few was a decision of faith which was a matter of real inward struggle for this man with a heart for the whole of Europe. At times Edith needed to be a shrewd and skilful comforter and helpmeet to Francis – strengthening his faith in the value of ministry to such a few. Ironically this was not without cost for Edith. For as the numbers of guests and visitors grew, she often struggled with the loss of energy and privacy that comes with having a home constantly full of people. Though she was convinced of the importance of what they were doing, she too struggled with it.
Francis and Edith were so convinced of their call that they stuck to this ministry to the few, isolated up in the seclusion of the mountains. Conversions and changed lives told them that they were indeed on the right track. In fact, the impact of their ministry of teaching through hospitality was such that guests began to flow in from all over the world – simply through word of mouth. Their home was becoming an extended household. Longer-staying guests, who were organically included into the work of the family, became workers and a form of commitment or agreement was brought in. Thus the extended household became a community.
Today l’Abri has a whole Alpine village in Switzerland and communities in England, Holland and the USA. The God who is there and answers prayer has demonstrated himself very well through the story of their amazing growth.
Many go to l’Abri because they are struggling with the faith, or with church, or with pastoral issues; or because they want to really work out what they believe about life and God.
There is something profoundly human about the feeling of a l’Abri community. It has something of the feel of a giant country vicarage, with the warmth, calm, welcome and quiet discipline of the place. Like the classic monastic approach to living, the day separates itself into times of reclusion for personal study and prayer; times of work, and times of rest. The day is punctuated by meals – a number of which are given over to free question-based discussion. A couple of times a week there will be lectures. These are the descendents of those 1940s conversation parties.
Over the years l’Abri has enjoyed great influence in the wider church without any official position or power. It has all happened through relationship, community-life, ministry to guests through hospitality and the quality of their theology – as put to paper in the now countless l’Abri books, tapes and publications. Through history it is often the small, independent, high-commitment close communities which have exercised a reforming role in the wider church. It was Anthony the Hermit who was wheeled out of the desert to speak decisively to the church of the 300s in a critical ecumenical Council. His prophetic voice helped hold the Church to a sound Biblical expression of faith. It was monastics like Luther, Melancthon, Bucer, and Erasmus who brought biblical reform to post-mediaeval Christianity sparking the great Reformation. It was Anabaptist farming communities - the Moravians –who through their lecturing, their hospitality, and the witness of their community life sparked a revival which spanned the Atlantic and transformed the face of western Evangelism. L’Abri sits squarely in that radical, reforming tradition.
Many people had and still have a problem with l’Abri being non-aligned. For many “endorsement” is still everything. I have certainly heard many speak ill-informedly about the dangers of small independent church communities going off the rails theologically. “If they would align themselves with a denominational structure - like the Catholics, the Anglicans or the Uniting churches they would be safeguarded against the dangers of losing theological focus.” So goes the line. If you belong to a small independent church, no doubt you have heard it before. However the history of those denominations, along with that longer historical view, might give the lie to that theory. I celebrate the story of l’Abri as a testimony to the quality of theology which can flow from being non-aligned – that’s to say accountable to Scripture and to conscience. The story of l’Abri brings another lesson to today’s teacher – because it is also a story of great influence without power.
It is my estimation that in the latter half of the 20th century, l’Abri exercised a reforming role in western evangelical Christianity which is simply without parallel.
L’Abri would probably eschew any such grandiose claims. They may not see the strong parallels between the call that has been upon them and the call that is now on the emerging, small, simple, missional, neo-monastic, household-based churches. But it is there, and their pattern of life bears closer resemblance to the way of the home church than the way of congregational or program-based ministry. If you read their story in Edith Schaeffer’s book l’Abri, I am sure you will sense that resonance.
My own little network, Jesus Generation, has drawn great inspiration from the testimony of Francis and Edith Schaeffer as the Lord has called us to greater engagement with theology, with politics, with the Scriptures themselves and with one another in community.
Many pioneers of small, simple church enter this new pattern of ministry through experiences of burnout or sickness, disappointment, slander, dis-endorsement. I can think of many friends in the ministry with stories of a fall like that. One way or another they have found themselves reduced to a very small sphere of influence. The wonderful thing about l’Abri’s testimony is that God is there and he answers prayers and such a fall may be not the end of a story but rather the full stop before a whole new chapter!